On Mon, 18 Feb 2002 14:41, Roland wrote:
At 12:32 PM 2/15/02 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
Exactly the opposite is true. When the (L)GPL is stamped onto code, every commercial programmer must reinvent the wheel rather than using it. Many of these programmers work for small businesses that are trying to compete
Another good point from your side. And here comes another question from my side: The point in favor of the GPL as brought by Jeremy, is that the xGPL will encourage contributions. I have to agree with Jeremie: with the BSD license, companies will tend to keep things back. Look at Apples OS-X. It is based on BSD, but they probably NEVER will make their code public. So what benefit does the community have from it?
They have release Darwin as well as an NFS testing tool. FreeBSD did benefit a lot from that testing tool.
Jeremie pointed out, that he wants to give all code produced in his company back to the WINE-tree. Now if WINE is GPL he will have an excellent argument for his customers: sorry, we have to contribute all code back.
I believe he already stated that he currently requires that their code be contributed back to WINE.
If WINE is not GPLd, his customers will probably want to keep the code proprietary, in order to have a competitive advantage over others... What can you say about that Brett?
I still don't understand the problem for Jeremy from a commercial stand point. His company is paid to develop code. Under either the BSD or LGPL, he would have the same situation.
Besides, as the owner of a company, he can always decide not to develop code for those potential customers who wish to keep the resulting code closed.
Maybe there is another kind of license that could adress both issues...but I doubt it...
Sean -------------- scf@farley.org